Airlines, Incidents and Investigators

Airlines, and the activities that they perform, are integral parts of our modern lives. They are one of the many sprawling sociotechnical systems that modern societies both depend upon and take largely for granted. They also reflect the dramatic shifts that have occurred in the past few decades towards ever greater levels of complexity, specialisation, technology and innovation in organisations. These trends are felt in industries as diverse as banking and healthcare, and are accompanied by increasing imperatives to understand, manage and control the risks and the reliability of complex organisational systems. Airlines offer a striking example of managing complex risks and assuring high reliability. It has become entirely unremarkable to be served dinner, catch up with some work, have a nap or settle down to watch a movie while travelling at nine hundred kilometres an hour, ten kilometres above the surface of the Earth, cocooned in a life-sustaining cabin wrapped in panels of material barely a few millimetres thin, entirely oblivious to the extremes of speed, pressure, temperature and lack of oxygen that exist in the lower reaches of the stratosphere, where airliners spend much of their time.